Today is the birthday of two very important and vitally different people who followed their dreams and changed the world. The first person is Steve Jobs. Love him or hate him, you can't dispute his very prevelant presence over our everyday modern life. From Apple computers to the iPods in your pocket to iTunes and features of the cloud, Steve Jobs made an impact in so many aspects of our modern life that his ripples reached throughout the earth.

If the worth of a person is what is remembered about him afterwards, Steve Jobs is immortal and will long be thought of as one of the true pioneers of modern technology. I am not necessarily an Apple fan, the extent of what I own are iPods for my music and audio books, but I bow to his beautiful sense of design and incredible ability to insist on the best for his products.

The other person's birthday is from a completely opposite view. Wilhelm Grimm was born in 1786 on today's date. Wilhelm and Jacob collected the folktales of the villages near their own and published them. When they realized that many children were reading their stories, they adapted the tales a bit to make them a bit less disturbing. They were sanitized even farther by Walt Disney whose Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood were all originally Grimm fairy tales. The original tales were full of evil people and monsters, blood and gore. They were cautionary tales, teaching the village children that safety only existed within the small villages and that the forest surrounding the area was filled with deadly dangers. Wilhelm and Jacob wanted to collect the old folk tales before they disappeared and thus, created a body of work that has far outlasted them. In fact, I just purchased a "Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales" book for my DH who was unable to find his childhood copy and wanted to have the tales and the Rackham illustrations at hand.

Arthur Rackham's marvelous illustration of Little Red Riding Hood.

Finally, just a quick note to thank those of you who were so kind as to Email me or message me about my artwork and my Deviant Art page. Your kind words really made my day. THANK YOU!

To answer your question - no, of course it's not. But it's up to us to create as many fairy moments as possible with the people we love. We should always try to do something good, every day. And that way, fairy moments will be here.

I love Rackham, and I really wish I had been able to read the original tales as they were passed down in spoken heritage in front of the hearths on winter evenings. I'm quite sure that these "fairy stories" had a huge impact on generations of children.

Exactly. As I told Binky above, many of these stories were actually based in fact and passed down as stories of caution, not the Fairie realm. Hansel and Gretl, as you had heard it, was indeed something that was not off the mark. Where today it might be told as a "don't run off and don't talk to strangers" type of story, in the older days of need and want, children were abandoned because they could not be cared for, and I'm quite sure that the fates of many of them were more than dismal. Today can be equally bad and horrific. Caution is always a good idea.

Before Steven Jobs, computers (and other office tools) looked like Army surplus. Heavy, square, utilitarian. They even came in Army surplus colors--khaki and black. I am not an Apple user, but I still remember my astonishment when I saw an early iMac with its translucent case in jewel tones. In addition to his sense of design and perfectionism, Jobs was a smart businessman who tried to anticipate and even shape user needs.

I loved the jelly bead colored Apple computers, always wanted one. But every time I compared features, I had to go with a PC based system. Also, I was always told that Apple computers were practically un-crashable, but I crashed every one I sat down at to try within five minutes. I still have fights with my iPod now, and iPods are about as simple as they come - LOL. I guess I just don't think like Apple people, although I love their design sense and their pure sexyness.

LOL! You pay a lot for that sexy design, and I could never justify it as long as there were alternative products. My one experince with Apple was when I was controller for a small advertising firm. This was back in the days of MS-DOS, and I was constantly frustrated by my inability to use the command line to tell the damn Mac what to do when it crashed (which did happen). I put a sign on the computer that said "In case of system error, sacrifice two chickens and a goat."